tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9212449567307925866.post2673065331504654717..comments2017-07-01T12:35:00.423-07:00Comments on Stuart Spence Stuff: Guess Who's Still Teaching at McGill?Stuart Spencenoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9212449567307925866.post-87465913936083800012016-01-28T23:13:01.741-08:002016-01-28T23:13:01.741-08:00I&#39;ve had Gus twice; once for Educational Psych...I&#39;ve had Gus twice; once for Educational Psychology, and once again for Measurement and Evaluation. Neither time did I get specific feedback at the end of the term for the final project. It&#39;s a legitimate concern to have, though questioning whether or not he actually read them in the first place is still quite speculative.<br /><br />BUT! Lack of feedback has been a consistent problem throughout my tenure at McGill and is hardly unique to him. Does that make it okay? No. Does that make him unworthy of teaching at McGill? Only if we fire everyone else who&#39;s never returned a corrected essay.<br /><br />Frankly, every other complaint lobbed against him in this is fairly petty and unfair. Having had him for Educational Psychology, it doesn&#39;t surprise me that he makes tangents away from the lessons in Measurement and Evaluation. It&#39;s just not a very interesting or complex subject. It&#39;s something would-be teachers need to know about, but there&#39;s only so much you can do to dress up the philosophy on why we have multiple choice questions. Hell, I&#39;m glad he just came out and said that the material was dry; one of the frank truths educators have to face is dealing with stuff in the curriculum that isn&#39;t very interesting. <br /><br />As for the whole &quot;leaving 30% early&quot; thing, those courses were 3 hours long, and I remember us often leaving at most 20 minutes early to either work in our groups [the class was relatively small, so having us work in groups outside of the class via an early dismissal makes sense], or to be let out early because we burned through one of our breaks and kept going. By the way, 30% of 2 hours and 50 minutes [I rounded up before] is 51 minutes. I normally wouldn&#39;t point out what was likely a minor exaggeration on your part, but given that you wrote a whole paper about education students not being able to calculate averages, it only seems fair.<br /><br />Gus is undeniably flawed, but the reason I will defend him is that he&#39;s one of the most engaging professors I&#39;ve ever had. He knows how to keep an audience&#39;s attention [impressive for a 3 hour course], and he knows how to simplify complex ideas into digestible chunks. He may go off on tangents, but its usually to illustrate a point or to inject some humor into the dry, dry material. Incidentally, I&#39;m fairly sure he was joking about actually having a test on averages, and it&#39;s not his job or responsibility to completely derail his curriculum based on a relatively small sample size illustrating a brain fart 6 people had who weren&#39;t laughed out by everyone else in the room because it&#39;s just common courtesy to not laugh at someone trying and failing to answer a question.<br /><br />I don&#39;t ever remember him using studies in class since they were part of the reading list. I don&#39;t begrudge him for neglecting those though because studies are quite possibly some of the most unappealing forms of writing imaginable. They have no sense of how to grab a reader&#39;s attention and are so impersonal and methodical in outlying every single solitary step; they might as well be written by robots.<br /><br />Finally, the actual legit complaint I&#39;ve heard that is unique to him hasn&#39;t shown up in either of your two articles about him. As funny and well-intentioned as he can be, there are times when his comments or jokes cross the line into uncomfortable, sexist areas. The world&#39;s certainly changed a lot since his time, and it seems like new rules about what&#39;s okay and not okay are coming out every week, but he is meant to be a professional. There&#39;d be no way we, as teachers could get away with some of the stuff he says, and as a role model to future teachers, he should impart that level of self-control. Thankfully, as my last class with him was ending, those kind of comments thinned out and he seemed to be exerting more self-awareness. Hopefully, that can continue without him losing his funny bone.<br />The Masked Donuthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13630360603738122912noreply@blogger.com